If You Chain a Dozen Right-Wing Writers to Typewriters ...

... how long will it take them to come up with Atlas Shrugged?

RWA1 just endorsed the Thanks to Starbucks campaign, an online petition supporting the Evil Scorched Caffeine Empire's support for same-sex marriage in the face of a campaign by the Christian Right. I added my name to the petition myself after a moment's equivocation, because it's a single-issue petition that doesn't do anything but give Starbucks a pat on the back for doing the right thing. It doesn't mean I like Starbucks, or would ever spend money in one; I don't drink coffee anyway, but if I did I would support independent cafes rather than an international corporate franchise. (I was about to add "with dubious ethics," but that would be a tautology.)

But here's why I mention RWA1: he commented "Thank Starbucks for resisting bigotry," but he was furious when the Susan Komen Foundation took heat for defunding Planned Parenthood, calling the reaction "the most brutal enforcement of liberal orthodoxy i have seen in fifty years." (No doubt because "I have queasy feelings about the subject of abortion".) Soon afterward he commented on the Catholic birth-control controversy that "Obama's message is that women's (and everyone's) bodies belong to the state, and there will never be an end to their intrusions on private decisions, if only to care for their "property" and to mitigate the costs of taking care of it." This indicates that he bought into the deranged right-wing meme that the contraception mandate would force women to use birth control whether they wanted to or not; of course the opposition came from ultra-conservative males whose message was that women's bodies belong to the Church. And not longer after that he commented on a state-level controversy that "The Girl Scouts have become a little PC, but this is outrageous. Bible-thumping zealots are getting too assertive in the legislature." But what about the Children, being brainwashed into Planned Parenthood Obamacare robots by the feminazis?

Oddly, though, RWA1 doesn't care about the brutal enforcement of liberal orthodoxy where same-sex marriage is concerned, even though it's exactly the same kind of issue: a virulent right-wing minority is claiming that this government action will force them to conform to liberal values. That's probably more true of same-sex marriage, in fact, than of the contraception mandate. No one will have to use birth control just because their insurance covers it, and no one will have to gay-marry if they don't want to. But it is true that the legalization of same-sex marriage will change the public face of civil marriage, and the churches will have to grapple with the issue even if they ultimately reject it. Bigots will have to explain to their kids why men are married to men and women are married to women. In principle this should be no more of a problem than explaining to them why not all Christians share their particular version of the faith, but it will be one more burden on their shoulders.

I'm not sure why RWA1 is willing to see gay marriage forced down the throats of the same people whose throats he wants to protect against birth control pills and recreational abortion. It looks like he wants there to be one issue he can appear to be liberal on (especially as he vibrates with the white racist background radiation that has been on the rise lately); this makes a person "unpredictable", which is widely considered a virtue in our debased political culture.